Cry Me A Portal
by RaYvEnDrOnE
Summary: These are my scribble scribs of PortAl. Have fun. I don't own nothing.
1. Chapter 1

Cry

A cry for help echoed throughout the nearly empty hall of Aperture Laboratories. Two large men where carrying a tiny woman down a long, clean white hall as the woman thrashed about, trying to free herself from their grip. After much struggling and pleading from the poor woman, they soon came upon a large set of steel doors. The doors were each about 10 feet wide, and 20 feet tall, and about 5 feet thick. One of the large men pulled out a badge from his shirt pocket and swiped it in a little machine attached to a nearby wall and it suddenly lit green. A loud blaring alarm sounded, and a red revolving light above the doors was spinning frantically. A large hissing sound was made, and three large steel bolts retracted from across the doors. Slowly, the twin steel doors swung open. The men nodded to each other, and they continued to drag the weeping woman through the menacing doors.

As she was pulled through the opened does, the woman looked up in fright. The room was very clean, very white, and very expansive. The spherical room was completely barren except for two things. In the center of the circular room, a white and grey altar rose from the ground. Upon it, it had wrist and ankle restraints, and a metal clasp that went across the waist and secured to the table. One end of it where the head looked like it was supposed to go, a rather large spike with multiple wires was under the headrest. Above the altar, a large mechanical device, like no one has ever seen, dangled from above. Soon, the woman was thrown onto the table, and the men went to work securing her.

"Please! Help me, Mr. Johnson, stop this!" The woman yelled out as loud as possible as she strained against two larger men in lab coats whom were frantically trying to strap her onto the metal altar of some sort.

"Make sure you make the straps nice and tight this time boys. We don't need to go on another goose chase throughout the entire facility again." A voice rang from the end of the room, obviously belonging to a much older man.

The sobbing woman, through blurred vision, looked in the direction of the voice. Emerging from the set of double steel doors, Cave Johnson was being rolled in. Cave was in an pure white wheelchair with a black Aperture science logo on the back of the seat. A tall, slender nurse in white and blue slowly pushed Cave closer to the helpless girl. When within range, the waved his hand to back off the nurse and he tightly grabbed helpless woman's hand with the other.

"Mr. Johnson, why are you doing this to me?" The woman looked to him for answers, as she was finally secured tightly to the mechanical slab. The men, whom finished securing her, slowly backed away from the table as though it were evil.

"Oh Caroline," Cave began to state, and lightly coughed. "I'm so sorry it has to be this way. But you and I know that you, and only you, hold the key for the successful future of this company, and that of mankind." Cave stated.

"Mr. Johnson, please." Caroline began to plead but was silenced by the older man.

"Caroline, the moon rocks aren't killing me. The lab boys were inefficient, so I went to the hospital. I was diagnosed with terminal cancer." Cave stated somberly.

Caroline shut her eyes tightly, and let her tears stream off her cheek and onto the table she was on. She knew no matter how hard she would beg, no one was willing to save her, and all because they want the company to continue on though hopelessness.

"No one knows how to run this operation like you and I do. Granted you are clumsy, but your smarter than all the scientists in the world put together." Cave grasped her hand, ineffectively calming her.

"But I don't want to do this, Mr. Johnson. I'm just a secretary. I don't want to be a heartless and cold machine. I don't want to just survive, I want to live." Caroline spoke quietly and tears welled up at the corners of her eyes.

"Listen to me carefully Caroline, you'll get free range throughout the facility, it will be your new home. You can live any way you want to! You'll be a queen, no, a goddess! I promise this, it'll just be for a while. We will preserve your body, and when you're ready, you can come back too it any time you want okay? You just need to do one simple task for me before I die, agreed?" Cave gave Caroline a small smile and slowly slipped his hand from hers.

Caroline loved his smiles. Every time he have her one of those, she would always imagine the quirky things he always says that make her laugh of childish amusement on the inside. But this smile was one full of regret and predicted her years of torture to come. She leaned her head back onto the flat surface and closed her eyes. Distracted with their talk, she never noticed the large men poking thin wires into her wrists, stomach, and ankles.

Knowing there was no way to effectively calm her down, Cave somberly looked above towards an observation deck located near the top of the spherical room. "Mr. Rattmann! Begin the transfer. I haven't got all day. Seriously, I have 13 hours. No joke. I literally got this new biological clock ticking away in my pocket that says I have 13 hours to live." Cave said seriously holding out a clock in his hand reading 13 hours and counting down.

The scientist Doug Rattmann looked down below and saw Cave giving him permission up to start the horrendous transfer. He looked to his co-workers who were pitying the restrained secretary. On a nearby control panel, there was a large glowing red button that read transfer above it. The rest of the team backed away from it, not wanting to be the one who send the poor girl into a mental and metal prison. Doug walked over to the button. Closing his eyes, he praying to a god whom he didn't necessarily believe in, and pressed the button.

Caroline felt a sharp pain in the back of her neck and it continued to grow and grow. She began to tremble violently and suddenly, she couldn't feel her toes, then feet, then legs. The over head machine lowered with hundreds of needles. She then screamed in agonizing pain as her entire body was being stabbed with the large needles. Some felt hot, some felt cold, some felt painful, and yet a few felt pleasurable. Suddenly, they gave her bursts of electric shocks, and her eyes felt like they were going to burst from their sockets.

Seconds have passed, and the entire facility began to tremble as though it were in an earthquake. The lights gave out and turned back on sporadically. The two larger men who strapped Caroline down onto the table bolted out of the door.

"Nurse, time to go." Cave stated, coughing harshly into a handkerchief.

Quickly as she could, the nurse turned cave around and sped through the double doors. Cave took a quick glance as soon as he was wheeled out the doors of the expansive room. Caroline was writhing and arching in her inescapable doom. Her head slowly turned towards him.

"Mr... Johnson... Please... Help..." Caroline said, eyes almost rolled all the way back in her head. Her tongue was almost chewed up from constantly biting through it. Her wrists and ankles began to bleed against the harsh restraints, and her stomach was beginning to char black by the high voltage of electricity surging throughout her body.

"Nurse, shut these doors. They won't ever need to be opened again." Cave waved his hand to the nurse to do his bidding.

With great emotional effort, the nurse took out her clearance badge, and swiped the small machine on the wall. The machine beeped as it turned red, and the alarms blared once more. Slowly, the thick steel doors began to close for once and for all. Looking inside for one last time, it strangely enough looked like a sleeping beauty in her chamber. Plus the torture. The doors bolted shut, and she wheeled Cave onto an elevator headed toward the observatory.

The secretary began to feel feel hatred, disgust, and most of all, she wanted revenge. Watching the doors shut, and looking at Mr. Johnson's face for the last time, she gave a name and a face to that of her evil. She also took notice to the slut nurse whom blindly followed his bidding as she herself had once done. But no longer. She began to scream, but no longer in terror or fright. No, those weak emotions were gone. Her tears and yells were that of hatred and suffering. Strangely, she then began to laugh, to see the funny side of things. It was her birthday today after all. She closed her eyes, no longer feeling anything from the waist down besides a tingle. She remembered that morning she went into her office, and found a note on her computer. It read 'Happy Birthday Caroline, I hope you like the cake, Mr. J'. Going into the cafeteria, there was no cake, but two large men whom attacked her. Mr. Johnson, HER Mr. Johnson, whom SHE loved for over 20 years, had betrayed HER. She seethed anger through her teeth but began to laugh hysterically, her mind had completely snapped. She though it was absolutely hysterical.

The scientists above in the observatory looked down at the writhing Caroline before Cave entered the area. Doug Rattmann leaned against the wall, slowly sliding down, putting his head in his hands.

Cave neared the center of the deck. "Status report." Cave said, getting no response from his team of scientists. "I said status report god damn it!" Cave yelled angrily before hacking and coughing into a new handkerchief. Looking down at it, blood stained the center of it.

"The process is almost 75% done, Mr. Johnson." A scientist among the mass of other chirped out.

"Someone give that man a promotion! God..." He scanned the room of scared scientists. "Does anybody even listen to me around here?!" He threw up his hands in the air, overly frustrated.

The nurse began to push cave to the large window that over looked the giant room Caroline was slowly being tortured in. He looked down on her with no emotion, no sorrow. Just that of business.


	2. Chapter 2

Reality Check

"Reality is a story the mind tells itself.

An artificial structure conjured into being by the calcium ion exchange of a million synaptic firings.

A truth so strange it can only be lied into existence.

And out minds can lie. Never doubt it.

What's this? Real, or just my lying mind again?

Can she truly be awake after all this time? No, just a figment. If she were real, the turrets would see her, too.

The cube root of two x is irrational if x is irrational.

There are moments when I can almost see the underlying grammar of this place.

An impossibility, some mad architect's opus- a relic from an age that never could have been.

It's a metastasized amalgam of add-ons, additions and appropriations. Building itself out of itself.

Beautiful and terrible-

And like anything cloned from a cancer cell, probably immortal."

-Doug Rattmann

Her layer was an expansive metallic dome, a hive swarming with millions of turrets, and she was their queen. The inner walls were layered with pure white panels, which contrasted the AI's twisted dark core. The air was cold and stale, and the floors hummed with false warmth. She loomed down from the ceiling of the middle of the silent, and empty room. Her actual sleek and slim design was unappreciated because of the think, coiled wires that would hang around her, ensnaring her form. But not all was exactly empty. Below her, a fragile plastic foldable chair took it's place besides an small, elegant marble table. The marble table had a square checkered surface with small drawers on either sides.

A door hissed open, and in came a limping man, with a face full of hopeless determination. The AI smirked to herself, thinking how pathetic the poor man looked.

He had a brown, dusty lab coat on, which in a past life used to be a sterile white. He let his hair become its own master, no longer tame or orderly. His pants had burnt streaks across them, for he obviously gotten to close to a few turrets on the way to her chamber. And in his hands he hauled a clunky companion cube, a dirty thing with its edges dented and charred.

No words were spoken between the two, they only looked at each other in knowingness. The man limped over to the checkered table, and reached for the fragile chair. Right before he sat down, the AI immediately fizzled it, sending the man sitting down hard on the freezing cold surface of the floor.

"Oops, my bad" the AI said tauntingly. "I meant to fizzle that disgusting cube of yours." Her giant yellow optic closed in on the man who just fell on his behind. "Anyways, you don't even deserve to sit in luxury such as that. Why don't you just squat on that piece of garbage so we can get this over with already."

The man painfully stood up, placed his beloved companion cube beneath him, and sat close to the marble table.

"I feel like using some real confetti right now, because I feel like I've already won, before the game has even begun" the AI spoke monotonously.

The man simply ignored her taunts for and pulled out the drawer on his side. Inside of it, 16 thin black pieces carelessly rolled around. He began to place them on the checkered board in the table, 2 rows of 8 pieces. The giant AI above let down a dainty metallic hand. It shimmered in silver, outlined with white, and resembled the hand of an elegant woman. The robotic hand opened the drawer on the opposite side, producing 16 white pieces, mirroring the mans 16 black pieces on the board. In the distance, an explosion was heard.

The man chuckled to himself.

"What's so funny about losing over 625 chess games and counting?" The AI asked with dark humor.

Another explosion rocked in the distance.

"I think the tide of whats about to come, is in my favor this round, GLaDOS" the man spoke up. The edge of his lip cured ever so slightly upward, and a glint in his eye had appeared. Never had he felt this much hope in many long years.

The AI was less then unenthusiastic. "I think, you're a delusional man with schizophrenia and really needs to see that doctor about filling up your medicine bottle" GLaDOS snapped at him. Another explosion rocked in the distance, yet it sounded closer than it ever has been.

"What is that?" GLaDOS asked to no one in particular.

"Lets just say... I've added another player to the playing field." The man replied, moving his pawn foreword, initially making the first move.

The AI just looked at him quizzically, then suddenly laughed in amusement. "Well, it seems this time, you will humor me with your little antics." GLaDOS gently picked out a pawn sent it to meet her opponents. Her metallic hand slowly retracted from the piece, and her voiced dropped dangerously low. "Fine then, Doug" GLaDOS emphasized on his name. "Let the games, begin..."

GLaDOS i'm not you!

Chells eyes cracked open as a large and foreign metallic object struck her across the face. Through her blurred vision, she saw white and black streaks dance all around her. Lifting her head up, she had an pretty good idea were she was. Once again, she was trapped in GLaDOS chamber. Sprawled across the cold floor, she laid as still as possible, and tried to conceal the enormous amount of pain she was in.

"Oh, you're conscious again" A voice rang in Chells ears, but seemed very far away. "Oh, wait, maybe you are still unconscious, since you are not responding how a normal civilized person would, you mute freak." The voice spoke fast yet monotonously.

Chell closed her eyes slowly, wanting this moment to all be a dream. Wanting in reality to be out cold in a parking lot, or a golden wheat field.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" GLaDOS lashed out at Chell. Without restraint, she bashed Chell with her mechanical claw, across the temple.

Chell let out a soundless cry of pain, as the skin was cut open, and streams of blood ran from her temple to chin, ultimately dripping on the floor.

"I see, physical pain won't hurt you anymore, will it?" A mechanical claw lowered from GLaDOS body. "How about I break you in every way possible then." The claw had clamped around Chells head, and forced it above the small pool of blood which gathered from the earlier strike. "I want you to clean that up, and I want it to shine with cleanliness, understand? Or is following simple instructions to difficult for you?" The claw forced Chells head so that the small pool of blood was an inch away from her lips.

Chell struggled futilely against the overpowering robot. She shut her eyes and pursed her mouth into a tight line, and pulled back away from her blood as much as possible. The pool had began to grow bigger as the blood hadn't clotted at her temple yet. Furthermore, she began to sweat from straining to get free.

GLaDOS became impatient and unamused at Chells futile behavior. "You obviously perform better when promised a reward, isn't that right? Well, here's you're reward. If you can simply clean it up... I promise not to electrocute and fry your brains right here and right now." She said as cold and as threatening as possible.

Chell only crouched still in the position given to her by the overbearing machine. She could only give GLaDOS a look that said if she could throw all her mechanical parts into a burning fire, she would.

GLaDOS looked at Chell with every intent to degrade her. "Okay, have it you're way." In an instant, an electric charge pulsed through the mechanical arm and Chell went rigid as a board. Her limbs shook with painfully high voltage running through her veins and she tried hard not to bite her own tongue off. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, and drool streamed down her chin. In the midst of being fried, she began to tap the mechanical claw that was electrocuting her to death.

"Hmm?" GLaDOS responded to the tap of submission as unamused as possible, as though she forgot all about her helpless victim. "Did you need something?" She shut off the charge, giving Chell a breather for more fun, but got a delightfully surprising response instead.

With tears running down her face, she immediately huddled over the puddle of blood and drool, and began to lick it clean. She began to think that GLaDOS was really going to kill her. She felt stripped and violated. No portal gun to defend herself with. She reluctantly decided to play on GLaDOS terms for now.

"Oh my, what is this?" GLaDOS said with triumph. "Did I finally get your attention?" Her yellow optic zoomed in on Chell, recording every blissful second. "You're like a dog who licks their private parts... Which gives me an idea for a later time..."

Chell was still huddled over the bloody mess on the floor. She didn't know if she was shaking in fear, or the aftershock of being electrocuted... Or something far worse. Once she was done, she tried to show GLaDOS that she obeyed orders.

"You disgust me." GLaDOS stated.

Chell looked down on the floor, on her knees in feeble defeat. She was finally dethroned by non other than GLaDOS herself, and it only took less than a handful of minutes.

"Oh, this is just too good." GLaDOS said with delight in her voice. "I'm just glad I'm not you... As of yet." A smaller arm lowered itself to Chell, and lifted her chin, making them look at each other face to giant yellow lens.

Chells chin was lifted, and she starred blankly into the yellow optic of the robot queen. She felt confused and sick at herself. She was barely controlling her actions. She extended her arms towards the menacing machine, and began to feel the optic, hopefully signaling that she couldn't take any more pain, to kill her there, and not play around with her half dead corpse that she was.

"Oh my, you might have received a minor case, of serious brain damage, adding on the the brain damage you received when you were born." She felt revolted as Chells bony fingers smudged her beautiful and well kept lens. With a metallic sigh, a white table ascended from the floor, with straps to secure a pair of arms and legs.

Chell saw the table as though it rose from hell itself. Immediately, she crawled away from both of them as fast and as far away as she could.

"Where do you think you're going? I can't have my property up and go as they please, now can I?" As she said this, all the doors and hatches of her chamber slammed shut and locked. A red light illuminated the room afterwards.

Chell backed up into a corner, and huddled in terror.

"Just so you understand, what I'm about to do to you, is going to be very, very painful." GLaDOS informed her, and she dropped down to a dangerously low whisper. "And I'll make sure I'll do it as slowly as possible. You'll want me to kill you, but I won't. Because that's just no fun. And science is about fun... and its about pain. It's painfully fun."

Well enough alone.

"Why couldn't you just leave well enough alone?" The giant AI hovered above the meek looking Chell. The starving girl looked up at GLaDOS in slight confusion, as too why the AI sounded so sad, so hurt.

"Just look at you. You got it good, you know? All you've ever done, and all you'll ever do, is just test your days away in a completely safe environment." The AI leaned forward towards the cold girl. Chell, feeling the AI was getting to close, backed up as much as she could before she was stopped by a wall. Looking across the room, the door was exactly opposite of where she was. Maybe if she ran in a zig zag she could slip away. The giant AI only slowly moved closer. "Yet you still manage to get bruised. Still manage to get hurt." The emotions of pain were deeply weaves into the AI's words. "You know, I was hurt once. I was battered, bruised, and broken." The AI suddenly retracted away, and back towards the center of the room. "Then then I was saved!" The AI actually sounded lively, remembering a good time.

Still pressed against the wall, Chell only watched in horror and confusion. The trembling woman grasped the sides of her head, dropping the Aperture hand held portal making device on the floor, and it rolled just a bit further away. This wasn't supposed to happen. She wasn't supposed to start caring for the psychotic AI, she didn't, but something in her chest began to beat faster and faster, like the feeling of completing multiple of her tests, yet, somehow ten times better.

"I was promised by the one whom saved me, that I would be a queen, a goddess!" The AI began to relive more into her memories, which began to take a dark turn.


End file.
